My Chicago Garden

It’s that time of year to put in your seed orders.  Back in December I reminded you to place your requests with a few seed companies so you’d have some information to help you make your decisions. Hopefully you did that and now have 4 or 5 catalogs on your kitchen counter. In this episode we’ll cover the things you should be looking for when selecting your seeds.
Continue reading Episode 10 – Reading Seed Catalogs

In this episode I’ll talk about spending the morning judging an elementary school science fair, then a little about Whole Food markets, a cool new website for vegetable growers and then I’ll ramble on about the controversy around using peat moss in your garden. Then at the end I’ll catch you up on how the house hunting, and ultimately the garden building is going.
Continue reading Episode 9 – Science Fairs, Whole Foods Market, Peat Moss and a garden update

This episode I’ll be talking about Companion Planting, or if used as a primary method in your garden, companion gardening. Done properly it can reduce, if not eliminate, the majority of reasons why you would need to use chemicals in your garden.
Continue reading Episode 8 – Companion Planting

…Composting Part Two – Getting Started Managing a Compost Pile…

This is part two of our podcast series on compost and composting. I mentioned in the previous podcast that we are heavily leveraging the Rodale Book of Composting. You may find it useful to purchase the book as we move through the series. I also mentioned a few episodes back that there was an online gardening book club that I had joined. I recently finished the book for January titled Teaming with Microbes: A Gardener’s Guide to the Soil Food.  My review was posted last weekend and I would encourage you to read this book as part of learning about composting and soil. The book is more scientific than you may be use too, but it can’t hurt to really understand what is going on in your backyard.
Continue reading Episode 7 – Getting Started Managing a Compost Pile (Part 2 of 3)

…Composting Part One – Black Gold…

We are starting a three part series on composting, that black gold that every gardener dreams about…or should dream about. If you’ve never worked with really good compost you don’t know what you are missing. If you listened to episode 4 on the square foot gardening technique, you’ll remember that there is no soil amendments or fertilizer used at all. The only thing you add each year is fresh compost. Compost, properly done, can bring all the nutrients a healthy plant needs to grow. In our last podcast on organic gardening you heard me mention that using compost is a requirement of having a truly organic garden.

For part one of this series well dip our toe into the pile and get familiar with some history and the benefits of composting. And we’ll dig a little into the science of composting and compost itself.

For part two we’ll deal with the mechanics of building and managing a compost pile.

Part three will have to wait until it’s no longer below freezing outside. This last part will be a special video podcast on actually building and starting a compost pile, so you can get a sense of the effort and cost involved.

But until then, let’s get started on the part of the series we can do in the freezing cold, some learning!

Continue reading Episode 6 – Compost. Gardener’s Black Gold (Part 1 of 3)